In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a “Catastrophic Emergency” the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency.

The only reason anyone is “moderate” in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

While the last two sentences of that paragraph do nothing for his argument, I do enjoy his explanation of religious moderation. Religious moderates don’t randomly pick which parts of their religions they will take seriously, rather they take seriously only those parts of their religion that have not proven incompatible with a functioning society. This is a process that has taken in some cases thousands of years, and so we should not assume that as time passes, our religions won’t continue to erode until there is nothing at all.

Some Denver Police officers claim that they are required to write at least 16 tickets per 8 hour shift. Here‘s the story. I thought police were supposed to serve and protect, not write as many tickets as possible. At some point you start to wonder who they work for – which should be the tax payer.

For about two dozen motorcycle officers, the order is to write 16 tickets for an eight hour shift. Fall short, and they will have to explain their slacking to superior officers.

Honestly as a tax payer I’m more interested in police fostering an idea of non violence in my fellow countrymen than making sure that kid going 5mph over the speed limit gets a ticket. There are some things more important than failing to signal.

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

I’ve always been one to believe that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That being said, I don’t see guns as particularly useful. I think that it is the culture around ‘the gun’ that needs to go. Idealy, we need to eliminate the need for people to use guns to kill other people. I don’t mean just teaching everyone martial arts, but rather the culture of violence that seems to be so large in the United States. In western Europe the number of people killed each year by guns is significantly less than in the United States. I don’t think that it is because there are stricter gun laws in Europe. I think people just aren’t as violent. We can learn a lot from our European counterparts.

And no, I don’t support the NRA, nor do I own a gun, let alone many guns, as to necessitate an entire rack.